The Legal Nature of the Rules for the Protection of the Civilian Population During Armed Conflicts

Abstract

This paper deals with the study and analysis the nature and characteristics of the legal rules established to protect civilians during armed conflicts. The rights and obligations enshrined in every legal rule are varied according to the characteristics to which they apply. The main purpose of the precise characteristics of these rules leis in two things: First, it clearly defines the boundaries that easily distinguishable from other rules, and the second it contributes to the clarification of their effects by identifying the nature of the rights and obligations contained in these rules. Starting from this importance ,the research's effort focused on identifying those characteristics in terms of customary, generalization, conditionality and imperativeness and their applicability to the rules in question. It has assisted in the exploration of this nature in the legal texts, judicial rulings as well as the behavior of States towards these rules. So that, the article depended upon the deductive method without overdone in some places the induction one , moving between description and experimentation in order to serve the research and mastered the scientific mechanisms and took from the theory without stand at its borders, but it in the position of the application in order to check its validity and discover their strengths or weakness.